This
hair better get me an Oscar: (l-r) Theron and Woody Harrelson
in North Country.

Victimized
AgainBy
Laura Leon

North
Country

Directed
by Niki Caro

Ripped from the script of this week’s Lifetime Network melodrama
starring Nancy McKeon as a brutalized. . . . OK, the movie
North Country is not born of a tradition of
bad TV movies, but inspired by the book Class Action
by Clara Bingham and Laura Leedy Gansler. Still, its resemblance
to Lifetime’s stock-in-trade is far stronger than any thread
that may link it to the book, and while that’s probably to
be expected in a mainstream Hollywood film, it’s a crying
shame.

The movie purports to tell the story of the real-life Lois
Jensen, an iron miner in northern Minnesota who endured years
of on-the-job sexual harassment, followed by years of legal
wrangling in the courts, to achieve a landmark decision that
required companies to establish, and follow, protocols to
discourage such treatment in the workplace. In North Country,
Jensen’s double is Josey Aimes (Charlize Theron), a woman
who should just go ahead and have a big old “v” for victim
tattooed on her forehead. You know, just in case we don’t
get the point with the abusive husband, unappreciative children,
dismissive parents and so on. It’s almost a no-brainer that
when Josie goes to work, either at the mill or anywhere for
that matter, that she’s going to get dumped on, which is a
huge detriment in terms of involving the viewer in what should
be an involving, emotional story.

Josey defies her father (Richard Jenkins), who likens her
desire to take a job at the mines with a need to profess her
“lesbian” status, and becomes a miner. In a series of quick
montages, we see Josie, with her newfound financial stability,
buying her first house, getting gifts for the kids, becoming
friends with other female miners and living a sort of good
life, finally. Except for the male chauvinists with whom she
works, that is. There are scenes, some quite grisly, that
limn the extent to which the women were harassed and threatened,
and, to a lesser extent, provide insights into why the women
stayed (and, later, why many of them were reluctant to join
the class-action suit). For the first half of the movie, Caro
does a mostly masterful job of evoking the lifestyle and limitations
of the barren northern Minnesota in which this story takes
place. Jenkins and Sissy Spacek, as Josey’s mother, telegraph
enormous amounts of information and emotion about their characters
into brief scenes.

Sadly, the filmmakers do everything they can to infuse the
story with melodrama. Potentially harrowing tangents, such
as the onset of a debilitating disease in Josey’s plucky coworker
Glory (Frances McDormand), seem included to show that the
actress can play ill rather than something that adds to the
fabric of the story.

By far the worse offense to the integrity of the real-life
women is the script’s insistence on threading the movie together
with courtroom flashbacks that focus on the paternity of Josey’s
firstborn. In other words, the complexities of the class-action
suit, and the enormity of what t he plaintiffs are attempting,
is boiled down to a question of “Who’s the daddy”? I guess
I should be thankful for some consistency (something that’s
rare in today’s screenwriting); the paternity issue speaks
to yet another atrocity performed against our plucky heroine.
It’s too bad that the filmmakers had to resort to such lows,
however, as if the viewers couldn’t possibly relate to Josey’s
plight for equal treatment at work without feeling sorry for
her as an abused woman. Such ploys serve to distance us from
Josey and her cause, rather than help us embrace both for
what they are.

A
Longshot Pays Off

Dreamer:
Inspired by a True Story

Directed
by John Gatins

First: Try to forget the stupid subtitle, which adds neither
eloquence nor necessity to the matter at hand. Second: Try
not to think too much about all the other horse movies you’ve
seen—you know, those stories in which a plucky kid puts his/her
faith in the horse in which nobody else believes, and ends
up in the winner’s circle. That done, you should be able to
do what I didn’t think possible, which is to enjoy this quiet
family drama much more than you have any right to expect.

Written and directed by John Gatins, Dreamer focuses
on how the rehabilitation and retraining of a horse, Soñador,
transforms a broken family and breeds success for a bunch
of old-fashioned dreamers. Eleven-year-old Cale Crane (Dakota
Fanning), a refreshingly normal child by Hollywood movie standards,
grieves for the loss of time and attention with her gruff
father Ben (Kurt Russell), a horse trainer working for the
imperious Everett Palmer (David Morse). When Ben advises Palmer
to hold back a horse—Soñador—from a big race, because he senses
that the horse is in pain, Palmer shrugs him off. Of course,
Ben’s prediction proves all too accurate, as the horse collapses
in a nasty, well-edited fall. The now-jobless Ben takes the
horse back to his farm, where he hopes to heal her enough
to become a money-making breeder. Joining him are Balon (Luiz
Guzmán) and former jockey Manny (Freddy Rodriguez), and, eventually,
his estranged father “Pop” (Kris Kristofferson). With Cale
at their center, this motley crew of horse lovers engage in
an against-all-odds struggle to reclaim the heart of a champion,
and, hopefully, make some money in the process.

What’s especially nice about Dreamer is the gentle
way its drama unfolds, and the subtle interplay of characters
with each other and, of course, the horse. Gatins’ script
evokes a genuine love of horses as well as the bittersweet
realities of today’s race world, which is heavily populated
by new money and foreign powers, leaving middle-class farmers
like the Cranes, not to mention their Mexican employees, out
in the cold. There are nice touches, not overplayed, in which
Cale, early on, is forbidden from entering a part of the stands
reserved for owners, and its later counterpart, when she and
Balon, part-owners of Soñador, are able to walk through this
hallowed section. Gatins doesn’t make too big a deal of this,
or, for that matter, of Palmer’s rude dismissals of the myriad
ethnics who work the stables, but the point is there; it adds
a much-needed bite to the sweetness of the movie.

There were times when I was reminded of those Shirley Temple
movies that my mother made me watch on cold Saturdays, and
I cringed in anticipation of a whiney plaint or, worse, a
tap dance and song, but Fanning and her stalwart costars are
far above that sort of thing, delivering instead underplayed,
essential humanity to their roles, raising Dreamer,
in spite of its hokey title, from the ranks of the less-than-inspired.

—Laura
Leon

Game
Over

Doom

Directed
by Andrzej Bartkowiak

Doom
is aptly titled, and not because it’s based on the groundbreaking
video game of the same name. No, the doom inherent in this
cinematic mutant is the sheer hell of sitting through it:
Doom may be the worst movie ever made. And that’s only
partly because it’s not quite a movie, but a moronic attempt
to cash in on the gaming industry. Doom assumes that
anyone who played the game—by all reports a challenging and
rather chilling experience—is a complete and total imbecile
who can’t follow the simplest plotline without obvious exposition
such as “I fell in a hole!” (this from a character who falls
in a hole).

The gist of the story is that in the year 2026, a portal to
an ancient civilization on Mars was discovered. Years later,
a scientific research team hunkered down in a Martian space
station comes under attack from mysterious entities. An elite
force of Marines is sent to the rescue, and one by one, they
meet their doom. The evolved demonology of the game has been
changed to anthropology; instead of supernatural terrors,
the Marines are now up against cruddy, Alien-type monsters
that come apart like hunks of stale cheese. Like the game,
the movie wallows in graphic violence and a depraved sensibility
that drives many of the characters to self-mutilation. But
since they don’t seem to be under any particular pressure—there
isn’t a suspenseful split-second in the entire movie—their
extreme behaviors are just icky. And the set design is complete
junk. And in case the infantile dialogue isn’t boring enough,
the characters all have their intentions telegraphed with
long, penetrating close-ups. The platoon leader, Sarge, is
played by the Rock, who exaggerates the cartoonish qualities
of his face to a really irritating degree.

Meanwhile, the camera closely follows the characters for their
every routine movement, perhaps trying to mimic the notorious
“first-person shooter” perspective of the game. The effect
is more like a home movie shot by a toddler. Subtitles announce
each change of location, no matter that these changes are
announced verbally at every turn. Karl Urban actually gives
it a go as Reaper, a Marine and the brother of one of the
surviving scientists. Smoldering as though his life depended
on it, Urban seems determinedly unaware that he’s in the world’s
stupidest zombie movie. First-person viewers should be so
lucky.